|
Page 18 of 26
17. The Debian kindergarten
If Richard M. Stallman and the Free Software Foundation are known for having unmitigated views on what is "freedom as in free speech", not "freedom as in free beer", the Debian Free Software Guidelines are also known to have some extremist views with regards to what is free and what is not free.
I used to call this license-Nazism. For instance, no matter the GNU Free Documentation License is a FSF creation, Debian is more Catholic than the Pope, and only considers it conditionally free!
The famous democratically-organized, legally-aware, freedom-committed Debian Project has serious problems with the idea of trademark licensing and protection. It seems to be problems with the understanding of their own license.
Last year, Linux New Media AG from Munich (the publishers of Linux Magazin, Easy Linux and Linux User) has issued at CeBIT 2006 an extended version of Debian Sarge, compiled by German members of the Debian Project to include packages or versions of them not present in the official Debian Sarge: X.org, SpamAssassin, Firefox 1.5 and more (Sarge has Firefox 1.0.x and it uses XFree86, not X.org).
This edition was still labeled "Debian Sarge". And they had no problem with that! To force a simile, it's like you're a customer of Mercedes Benz, and you notice that a modified car is still labeled "Mercedes" (and not "SsangYong, powered by Mercedes", but simply "Mercedes"). And Mercedes is doing nothing about that issue. To them, it's even OK to have the fake car labeled "Mercedes", as long as it's not labeled "Genuine Mercedes". Wouldn't you be offended that Mercedes doesn't care about that? Would you keep buying from Mercedes, as long as they don't care to protect their trademark? Probably not. How would you tell which Mercedes is genuine and which is not?
Debian fails to understand that even the user of a free product is still a customer. Red Hat understands that, and it would react in defense if a modified Fedora Core 6 would still be labeled "Fedora Core 6 Zod" instead of something like BLAG, for instance.
It should come then at no surprise that Debian failed to accept Mozilla's Trademark Policy. While everybody else had no problems with it, the Debian people found it in violation of DFSG #8, so they had to come up with a whole different Zoo to "fix" the bug: you don't have anymore Firefox, Thunderbird and Seamonkey in Debian, but Iceweasel, Icedove and Iceape.
Would you rather have a web browser with 15% of the market, or 15 privately branded Firefox-based browsers each with 1 percent? Except for finding more about the Earth's fauna, I can see why many people got angry about the change of the names in the Mozilla products shipped with Debian.
Going to the kindergarten now. Dunc-Tank was an experiment to see how targeted fund raising can improve Debian, and whether Debian 4.0 etch could be released on schedule on the 4th of December, 2006 (which of course did not happen).
It wasn't all about money though. As the then DPL Anthony Towns revealed, «Steve Langasek, who is one of the release managers, was basically working 18 hours a day on his day job to do PHP coding, and he wasn't having enough time after that to look into some of the release critical issues that we were having.» Just how bad can a project management be, when you appoint as a Release Manager someone who is already busy for 18 hours a day with something else?!
It can be understood that the majority of Debian developers were not happy with the decision to have someone be paid for a work the rest of them are doing for free and for fun. There is nevertheless a long way from disgruntling to the kindergarten-like mutiny that was the Dunc-Bank, «an experiment to see how aggressive bug reporting can delay the release of Debian Etch. We hope that by finding more and more RC bugs in Debian we can delay Etch.»
If this is not deliberate sabotage by your books, we're definitely playing different games.
The Dunc-Bank sabotage was initiated by Sam Hocevar, a well-known Debian developer. Then, Sam Hocevar was elected as the new DPL for 2007! It's useless to ask "how many voted for Sam", because the Debian elections are using an advanced Condorcet voting system with Schwartz Sequential Dropping, to guarantee that the winner is the candidate that is the less hated, if I am allowed to put it this way. That means Sam was the best choice for Debian, as expressed by the voice of the Debian developers. In my opinion, Sam is the worst thing that could happen to Debian, and a clear sign that Debian is going nowhere.
This is suicide for Debian. Mere suicide. As Sam was elected by the Debian developers, Vox Populi, Vox Dei. Debian will continue to be largely unaffected by this decision, but electing the main saboteur as your leader is ruining the last attempt to trust the Debian Project.
You will trust Debian even less once you will find that, while their repositories include plenty of obsolete or orphaned packages, the Debian New Maintainer page is currently listing 102 Applicants in Process, and you can also see that an applicant can wait up to 814 days to pass all the procedures!
I would close by borrowing the words of Ladislav Bodnar (LXF91, April 2007, p. 38): «Debian developers ... re-read point 4 of the Debian Social Contract: "We will be guided by the needs of our users and the free software community. We will place their interests first in our priorities." If you still conclude that what you have to say is in the best interest of your users...» To me, it looks more like vanity.
|
Articles 
